K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

In praise of Debian 5

That’s right: Debian 5. Not 6, 5. I touched on that point briefly in a post early last week, but didn’t get the chance to expound upon it too much. Real life intruded.

But the overarching idea is the fact that Debian 6 requires slightly more memory as a bare minimum. For old-old-old machines that fall below that 43Mb mark by default, they’re going to require upgrades to stay current (technically speaking, of course).

On the other hand though, 32 megabytes, which was a common watermark among late-generation Pentiums, is still very much accessible to Debian 5.

The same comment was made when Lenny went stable and Etch became old stable. I still have a Knoppix 5.11 cd which I use as a general purpose trouble-shooting boot cd (based on Debian Etch and Knoppix 3.5) because it will boot and run on most old computers which will boot from CD. For the same reason, if Knoppix 5.11 won’t boot with 16M of RAM, I use Damn Small Linux (2.4.x Linux kernel).